In 1530 peanuts were exported to India and Macao by the Portuguese, and to the Philippines by the Spaniards. Later, the peanuts were brought by merchants to China, where they were immediately considered a useful crop for the fight against hunger. The production in our country began in 1870, in the province of Alessandria, reaching its peak in the early 60s, and then having a slow decline. Currently, production is rather poor and the regions producing peanuts are, in practice, only two: Veneto and Campania. In 1903, the American agricultural chemist George Washington Carver started to search new uses for peanuts, obtaining more than 300 products, including beverages, cosmetics, dyes, drugs, laundry soap, insecticide and printing ink.
The peanut produces the homonymous fruit with a yellowish color that contains two or three oval seeds covered with a reddish film. Peanuts are composed of: 40 to 50% of oil and about 20 to 30% of proteins. The nutritive value of peanuts is impressive, they contain many fibers, 13 vitamins and 26 minerals, many of which are not present in today's food.